Place and Cyberspace

For cyberlibertarians, the other shoe is rapidly dropping. In a curious inversion, those who argued less than a decade ago that cyberspace was a place all its own-and therefore unregulable by territorial governments'are finding their arguments and assumptions used for a very different end. Instead of concluding that cyberspace is outside of the physical world, courts are increasingly using the CYBERSPACE AS PLACE metaphor to justify application of traditional laws governing real property to this new medium. Dan Hunter's excellent article2 explains how and why this is happening with uncanny accuracy, pointing to the power of metaphor in influencing legal thinking and the particular strength of metaphor in making the new